I'm seeing oracle P/E today at 18.6 -- where are you getting 53?

No doubt the phone companies whose processes were criminally negligent in allowing a person like this to engineer transfer of the number will also be brought to trial and punished.

Ha ha ha. I crack myself up!

From a 1996 Wired Magazine interview. ( http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.02/jobs_pr.html ):

Wired:
Could technology help by improving education?

Steve Jobs:
I used to think that technology could help education. I've probably spearheaded giving away more computer equipment to schools than anybody else on the planet. But I've had to come to the inevitable conclusion that the problem is not one that technology can hope to solve. What's wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology. No amount of technology will make a dent.

It's a political problem. The problems are sociopolitical. The problems are unions. You plot the growth of the NEA [National Education Association] and the dropping of SAT scores, and they're inversely proportional. The problems are unions in the schools. The problem is bureaucracy. I'm one of these people who believes the best thing we could ever do is go to the full voucher system.

I have a 17-year-old daughter who went to a private school for a few years before high school. This private school is the best school I've seen in my life. It was judged one of the 100 best schools in America. It was phenomenal. The tuition was $5,500 a year, which is a lot of money for most parents. But the teachers were paid less than public school teachers - so it's not about money at the teacher level. I asked the state treasurer that year what California pays on average to send kids to school, and I believe it was $4,400. While there are not many parents who could come up with $5,500 a year, there are many who could come up with $1,000 a year.

If we gave vouchers to parents for $4,400 a year, schools would be starting right and left. People would get out of college and say, "Let's start a school." You could have a track at Stanford within the MBA program on how to be the businessperson of a school. And that MBA would get together with somebody else, and they'd start schools. And you'd have these young, idealistic people starting schools, working for pennies.

They'd do it because they'd be able to set the curriculum. When you have kids you think, What exactly do I want them to learn? Most of the stuff they study in school is completely useless. But some incredibly valuable things you don't learn until you're older - yet you could learn them when you're younger. And you start to think, What would I do if I set a curriculum for a school?

God, how exciting that could be! But you can't do it today. You'd be crazy to work in a school today. You don't get to do what you want. You don't get to pick your books, your curriculum. You get to teach one narrow specialization. Who would ever want to do that?

These are the solutions to our problems in education. Unfortunately, technology isn't it. You're not going to solve the problems by putting all knowledge onto CD-ROMs. We can put a Web site in every school - none of this is bad. It's bad only if it lulls us into thinking we're doing something to solve the problem with education.

Lincoln did not have a Web site at the log cabin where his parents home-schooled him, and he turned out pretty interesting. Historical precedent shows that we can turn out amazing human beings without technology. Precedent also shows that we can turn out very uninteresting human beings with technology.

It's not as simple as you think when you're in your 20s - that technology's going to change the world. In some ways it will, in some ways it won't.

"Looking back, Christoforo is still a little shocked that what he thought would remain a private email conversation got blown into an Internet event the way it did." This show a blinding misunderstanding of the Internet. I always act/write/post/upload and assume anything i send to anyone could end up in the faces of the planet. To not do so invites this kind of idiocy. The measure of the man is that he acted the way he did because he thought he was acting 'in secret'. People who act this way are not the kind of people I trust to work with me reliably.

CFL bulbs themselves, in the way their ballasts operate, send strange EMF spiky behavior throughout the electrical system they are attached to, i.e. , the school building. Supposedly, they are horrible for people. Wireless routers, no effect by comparison.

Utopias is, at 24%, about the highest you can get with yeast fermentation - they use a very specially bred super-strain of yeast with very high alcohol tolerance... most yeast quit somewhere between 9 and 15%, up to about 17% for some champagne yeasts. Utopias is surprisingly good (I tasted it at the Great American Beer Festival) - a port-like beer, if you will. I do not think it is worth the asking price of $100 a bottle, though. I completely agree that any form of distillation causes beer to stop being beer, as well.

As far as I can tell, email distribution lists and automated rules for re-sending email after receiving them from an email list is also covered under the claims in this patent. How did the patent examiners fail to see this?

This looks really good, I'd definitely have gotten this book if it existed back when I had to learn all this stuff starting in 1997-2000.

I used the first ed years ago, and sure enough, Unicode, OTF, anf PDF dominate my world now. The only thing that is complicated enough to need additional exposition would be Arabic, with it's ability to not only combine RTL and LTR text (Hebrew does as well) but has to be shaped contextually.

Wonder if they get into trouble with Nintendo.

I always liked that poem... Eliot is freaking brilliant. "Let us go then, you and I / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table..." I do vastly prefer "The Four Quartets" tho, particularly Burnt Norton.

My best friend in high school liked Prufrock so much, he memorized the entire poem (1100 words) for the fun of it.